Well, here we are. I just checked the first blog post and it was dated August 24th, 2014. I had probably been working on the back end of the site getting things running for the basic blog setup a few weeks prior to that. It’s almost been a full year since I started working on this idea.
So it is with great pleasure that I can finally say…
If you’re just now joining us, let me re-iterate the mission statement for this website.
PIXLS.US Mission Statement
To provide tutorials, workflows and a showcase for high-quality photography using Free/Open Source Software.
I started this site because the world of F/OSS photography is fractured across different places. There’s no good single place for photographers to collaborate around free software workflows, as well as a lack of good tutorials aimed at high-quality processing with free software.
That lede image above is a quick (and dirty) snapshot of my go-to bag for running out the door. I thought it might be fun to take a diversion and talk about gear a little bit. Here’s the full image again:
I took a bit of a break from writing articles to work on getting the forums up and running. We are almost back to a stable enough point that I want to turn my attention back to writing.
I say almost because there are still a few wonky things that I’d like to work out. There is still a little bit of an issue with the comment embeds from the forum for full-blown articles.
One of the reasons for the possibly strange behavior for articles in the forums is that darix convinced me to go ahead and get SSL setup for the domains. So working on it yesterday we got it running for both the main site here, as well as at the forums.
You should notice an indicator in your browser that your connection is over https somewhere (a little green lock?) for this page right now. I’ve set all connections to PIXLS.US to use SSL now (same thing with the forums).
I think we are at an interesting time for digital imaging. I came across this graph on Petapixel the other day that showed camera sales from 1947 - 2014:
There was explosive growth driven by the Compact Digital market right around 2000. Likely driven by the advent of those inexpensive compact digital cameras and the ubiquity of home computers. It was relatively cheap to get a decent digital camera and the cost per photo suddenly dropped to a previously unheard of amount (compared to shooting film).
This meant that substantially more people were now able to take and share photographs.
That precarious plummet after 2011 seems frightful for the photography industry as a whole, though. The numbers from the graph would seem to indicate that production in 2014 dropped to below the values from 2001.
After much hard work, that basically consisted of me annoying darix as often as possible, I am glad to say that we finally have a Discourse instance set up! Super Big thank you to darix for all the help!
What does this mean? For starters, we now have a forum/community in place that we can start building around photography and free software.
A neat side-effect of this forum is that we now also have a way to embed forum threads as comments on posts (only blogposts at the moment - I’ll add them to articles shortly).
At the bottom of any blog post you should now either see a series of conversations happening with a Continue Discussion or a link to Start Discussion.
Either of those buttons will take you to the actual forum to continue the conversation.
Replies to topics that are tied to posts will show up as a conversation at the bottom of the post (check the bottom of this post).
The site is open and live at the moment (if a bit bare-bones). Feel free to drop by and create an account, comment on things, start new topics, etc. I’m testing things out at the moment to see if I need to possibly bump the server specs in order to handle the loads (most likely). (In the course of writing this, I went ahead and bumped the server RAM to 2GB - so it should run smoothly).
I spent a little time struggling conceptually with how I wanted to categorize the different types of content I am planning for this site. As I had previously noted, I was already done with creating a blog post type of content, and had noted that I was working on how to show tutorials and ‘showcase’ types of posts.
Apparently, I had the answer in mind when I created that graphic last month. If you notice the two other types of content I am working on, Tutorials and Showcase, are both listed as types Articles on the graphic.
I tried to find a good funny reference to Jack Handey here but failed. Which might be a good thing given how the reference likely shows my age…
I have been working on various bits of the site as well as finishing up a long-overdue article. I’ve also been giving some thoughts in general about interesting ways to move forward with some ideas which I will bore you all with shortly.
I hate when things take me away for a little while, but won’t make any apologies just yet for having little activity here! It’s mostly a one-man show here at the moment so I do beg for some patience as I build things out and get articles together.
Speaking of building things out…
I have been giving some thought to the general site structure lately. I thought it might be fun to talk about it briefly.
My original (and still current) intention for the main piece of content for PIXLS.US is a tutorial. It’s the main type of content I was writing on my blog as well as what I’ve been trying to update on http://www.gimp.org/tutorials. It’s a nice, known quantity…
2015 seems to be getting started nicely!
Just before the holidays Ian Hex sent me his finished tutorial to post, and I just finished editing it. It’s a wonderful look at using Luminosity Masks in darktable for targeted adjustments. (Parametric masks in darktable-speak). You can find the new tutorial here:
It’s been a busy month (+ ½) for me personally. Things have finally settled down so I can get back to writing articles and working on the site.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m currently working through a re-write of the various tutorials I had done about using Wavelet Decompose for skin retouching. I’m about 2⁄3 of the way through it now and expect to have it finished shortly.
Free/Open Source Photography
Unless otherwise noted content on this site, PIXLS.US by Pat David, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.